Robert E. Desrochers, Jr.

Slave-For-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704–1781

SLAVERY and the newspaper grew up together in Massachusetts, in a close and synergetic relationship that made slave-for-sale advertisements a regular feature of the local press for most of the eighteenth century. Indeed, New England's long history of trading slaves in print dated practically to the birth of the newspaper in colonial British America. The Boston News-Letter, the first successful weekly published anywhere in the colonies, had been in business barely a month when, on June 5, 1704, local merchant John Colman initiated the practice by offering up "two Negro men" along with a "Negro Woman & Child." Unencumbered by competition for roughly the next sixteen years, the News-Letter averaged one new slave-for-sale notice in every second issue and brokered the exchange of more than 500 slaves through 1720. A die had been cast.

As the newspaper press in Massachusetts expanded so did the newspaper slave trade. The Boston Gazette, established in December 1719 , quickly overtook the rival News-Letter and all future comers as the town's most advertising-friendly weekly. ¹ By 1781 , when slave trading in the Gazette ended for good, masters had placed 1,103 different slave-for-sale advertisements in its pages; counting repetitions, three-fourths of the roughly 3,200 editions of the Gazette printed from 1719 through 1781 included at least one such announcement (see Figure I). In all, approximately 2,000 people of African descent, newly arrived slaves and seasoned hands alike, appeared for sale in the Gazette alone. Meanwhile, masters sold untold other slaves in organs other than the Gazette, which despite its status as eighteenth-century Boston's longest-lived newspaper remained one of three to five weeklies published in the town at any given time down to the American Revolution. ²

Though slavery never flourished anywhere in New England to the extent that it did in Britain's southern and island plantation colonies, relativism and static observations about its marginality obscure the ways in which New Englanders at certain times, in certain places, and under certain conditions made the institution work. Too great a focus on slavery's negligibility in Massachusetts has perpetuated the New England studies tradition of exceptionalism by masking ways in which developments and trends in New England dovetailed with broader currents of slavery and political economy in the non-plantation societies of the mid-Atlantic and the North and in the larger Atlantic world.³ The 1,487 extant advertisements in two Boston newspapers, the Boston News-Letter (1704–1720) and the Boston Gazette (1719–1781), provide a foundation for a structural analysis of the Massachusetts slave market that the press both supported and helped to create.⁴ The newspaper slave trade also helps chronicle the significance over time of slavery in Massachusetts, identifying a period of slavery's marked growth there in the 1720s and 1730s and a reversal of fortune in the 1740s and 1750s, when serious problems with and questions about the institution as a functioning labor system emerged. These problems contributed to slavery's rapid demise in Massachusetts beginning in the 1760s.

Figure I: Slaves advertised for sale in the Boston Gazette, July 8, 1728. As a poem on "The News-Paper," widely published in New England and elsewhere in 1770, bluntly put the matter of the print slave market, "No matter whether good or bad, / We tell you where they may be had." Flanked by items that included a runaway notice from Philadelphia, the five slave-for-sale advertisements here speak not only to the visible role of slaves in the local economy, but also to the self-assumed role of the press as agent of larger social identity in a colonial English Atlantic world tied together by print, consumerism, and—not least—by the shared experience of slavery.

Boston, the hub of the slave trade and much else in colonial Massachusetts, never had a single slave marketplace.⁵ It had many. Merchants routinely imported slaves per order, as when Antiguan émigré Jacob Royall sent home for "a negro Boy" requested by Governor Jonathan Belcher. Slaves not claimed prior to their arrival might be sold right from the decks of the creaking vessels that transported them, perhaps by a ship's captain who doubled as proprietor of part or all of his human cargo. Eighteen years almost to the day before his son signed the Declaration of Independence, William Ellery of Newport, Rhode Island, steered his brig Jenney into Boston on July 3, 1758, and thereafter gave "constant Attendance" to selling the mixed sex cargo of new slaves that it carried and he owned. More often, though, ship's captains such as Edward Stiles acted as agents for the merchant-slavers who employed them. In August 1744, Stiles, commander of the sloop Adventure, sold a cargo of "likely Negro Men and Women" for importer Peter Putch.⁶

Sometimes merchants themselves sold the slaves, as did "Messrs. Gunter & Perkins, Merchants," who on May 28, 1739, climbed aboard "the Brigantine Endeavour" and auctioned off its "parcel of very likely Negro Boys and Girls." At other times they hired professional salesmen. Bids for a "parcel of likely Negro Boys and Girls" sold in August 1744 could be registered at auctioneer James Russell's warehouse in Charlestown or, preferably, on board "the Schooner Post-Boy" docked nearby. Shipboard slave auctions lowered both the costs of billeting new slaves and the dangers of bringing them ashore. Despite the quarantining of entering ships aboard which sickness had been rampant at Spectacle Island in Boston harbor, infectious disease, especially smallpox, posed a real and deadly public health threat. Once landed, slaves also stood a better chance of running away.⁷

Circumstances dictated that not every new slave could be sold aboard ship, however, and such a sales strategy obviously did not apply to resident slaves. On land, many a search for slave labor in Boston began and ended along the bustling King Street corridor that connected the warehouses of Long Wharf to the commercial center of town (see Figure II). Three of Boston's busiest public houses—the Royal Exchange, the Crown Coffee-House, and the Bunch of Grapes tavern—lined that half-mile stretch. All offered fine drink and lively conversation, and at times all served as clearinghouses for slaves. So did the Sun Tavern, a block away near the Town Dock. An advertisement from the November 20–27, 1727 , issue of the Gazette announced a typical tavern sale. "On Thursday the 30 Currant," it read, "will be Sold by Publick Vendue, at the Sun Tavern on Dock Square at Five a Clock P.M. Four likely Negros, and Sundry sort of Merchandize, all to be seen at the Place of sale from two of the Clock till the Sale begins." ⁸

Buyers also could have found slaves among "sundry other items" at various establishments along Merchants Row, the narrow throughway that crossed over to the Town Dock at the bottom of King Street. Many of Boston's best-connected importers set up shop there, including Charles Apthorp, who at least three times in the 1730s offered slaves "just imported" from his prime storefront location on Merchants Row. Slave buyers, in addition to the neighborhood of Long Wharf and the Town Dock, commonly prowled the North End, with its dozens of warehouse-lined wharves, busy shops, and genteel private residences. Slave trading activity concentrated around Long Wharf (where most new slaves entered), the King Street and Dock Square area (the heart of town), and the densely populated North End. At one time or another, though, newspapers promoted slave sales that took place on all the major streets and many of the narrow alleys of eighteenth-century Boston.⁹

Figure II: Boston in 1722. The Town House (a) is at the juncture of Cornhill and King Street, a short distance from Dock Square and the Town Dock. Detail from "The Town of Boston in New England by Cpt. John Bonner." Engraved by Fra[nk] Denning. Reprinted Boston, 1835.

Public slave auctions transpired all over metropolitan Boston, not just aboard ships and in taverns. On consecutive Tuesday and Friday afternoons in late May 1730 Jacob Royall, who as Boston's most active slave trader marketed slaves in the Gazette no fewer than nineteen times between 1725 and 1734, vended "a Parcel of likely Negroes" near the Dorchester burial ground. Wherever they occurred, auctions usually involved many slaves, often new arrivals. But not always: in April 1767, a lone thirty-eight-year-old slave woman stood on the block in the North End home where she had lived for years. The proceeds of her sale went to settle the insolvent estate of her recently deceased master, Captain Moses Bennet. Advertisements noted forty-one other slaves sold as part of estates. Auctions and estate sales notwithstanding, the vast majority of merchant-slavers and individual slave sellers preferred to do business on a one-to-one basis. Better than nine out of ten notices announced private slave sales, not auctions.¹⁰

Masters consigned slaves only as a last resort and routinely traded slaves in their homes. When John Knight wanted to sell his "Negro Boy" in May 1732 he directed buyers to "his House in Sudbury-Street." Likewise, in 1774 Captain Jean Francois Magellon sold a seventeen-year-old male slave who spoke English and French at "the House" he shared with "Capt. Isaac McDaniel." Tradesmen commonly had customers inquire at their places of business. Anyone interested in John Boidwen's male slave, a teenager who knew some English, could inquire at Boidwen's cordwaining shop "near the Town House." The line between shop and home blurred for the many artisans who worked where they lived. Merchant importers like William Clark usually maintained separate residences. In late summer 1727, Clark offered four "lately imported" men "to be seen at his House near the Old North Meeting House, or at his Ware house in Merchants Row." In 1734 "John Phillips Merchant," sold "A Parcell of likely Negro, Men, Women and Boys" at "his Warehouse near the Swing Bridge, or at his House in School Street." Businessmen like Clark and Phillips sought to sell imported slaves with dispatch because quick turnarounds lowered the costs of upkeep, freed capital, and—not least—enabled them to pay their own substantial debts.¹¹

It is testimony to both the pervasiveness of slavery and the power of the press that middling tradesmen and artisans engaged in virtually all facets of Boston's urban economy bought and sold slaves in print alongside well-connected merchants, ship's captains, and the "better sort." Bakers, barbers, blacksmiths, braziers, builders, and butchers; carpenters, coopers, cordwainers, distillers, and doctors; goldsmiths, gunsmiths, hatters, ironmongers, joiners, midwives, nailors, painters and printers; riggers, rope makers, saddle-tree makers, sawyers, shoemakers, silk dyers, sugar bakers, tailors, tanners, and tobacconists all counted among slave traders in the Gazette. As Tables I and II illustrate, the range of skills and work experience possessed by the slaves these masters sold, especially the males, reflected this diversity, even if flexibility—slaves' ability to perform a wide range of indoor and outdoor tasks—remained by far the trait Massachusetts masters desired most. Political and religious leaders and other men of standing, those whose concerns and words dominated much of Boston's public discourse, placed more than their share of advertisements. Thus did slave sellers in the Gazette include a number of self-styled "esquires," more than one judge, two military men (a colonel and a major), a deacon, a doctor, a marshal of the Court of Admiralty, and, from the grave, one provincial governor. The considerable worldly possessions of "his late Excellency Governor Burnett," auctioned off in 1729 , included "a Negro Woman" as well as "about 12 Years service of a Mollatto Boy." Regardless of calling or social status, men dominated the newspaper slave trade. Women placed fewer than 5 percent of advertisements that listed sellers' names. ¹²

Table I
Varieties of Work Done by Male Slaves Offered for Sale, Boston, 1704–1781.

Sources: Boston News-Letter, 1704–1720; Boston Gazette, 1719–1781.

By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, one-third to one-half of all the slaves in Massachusetts lived and worked in and around Boston. Slavery did not stop at the town line, however, and neither did slave trading. Slaveowners from at least twelve Massachusetts towns outside Boston bought space in the Gazette, as on eight occasions between 1720 and 1738 did slavers from Newport, Rhode Island, who regularly did business to the north and who did not gain a permanent newspaper of their own until 1758. In February 1760, Joseph Whipple of Providence, Rhode Island, advertised an entire slave family "cheap for Cash." From Connecticut, which likewise boasted no newspaper of its own until the 1750s, came word in May 1728 of the approaching sale of "an Estate in New-London," where in June bidders could have their pick of the deceased's "Stock, Negros, or the Land only." From its inception, the Gazette had, in the words of its first publisher, William Brooker, sought to incorporate "people that lived remote from" Boston into the town's commercial orbit. True to Brooker's vision, the slave trade carried on in the newspapers effectively united far-flung urban and rural masters in an expansive slaveholding community that enhanced communication, cooperation, and, not least, commerce across the miles.¹³

Table II
Varieties of Work Done by Female Slaves Offered for Sale, Boston, 1704–1781.

Sources: Boston News-Letter, 1704–1720; Boston Gazette, 1719–1781.

Greater knowledge of slave sellers in Boston newspapers is hampered by the absence in more than half of all notices of sellers' names. As Table III shows, this trend toward anonymity grew much more pronounced as the century wore on. Through the 1720 s, better than 70 percent of advertisements included the name of the seller. By the 1740 s, that figure had dropped to just 20 percent and never exceeded 15 percent in any decade after that. The proportionately greater presence of merchant traders in the early years of the newspaper slave trade helps explain the higher percentages for the 1710 s, 1720 s, and 1730 s. Importing houses like the firm of Guionneau and Leblond wanted people to know they had slaves for sale, and where. For the individual sellers who dominated the trade in later years, anonymity had distinct advantages. In Boston, much to masters' perpetual consternation, both word and slaves got around. Printing offices employed slave pressmen and typesetters who had to be functionally literate, and a man of color known around town as Black Peter delivered the Boston Evening-Post for Thomas Fleet and with it, perhaps, news of imminent sale for local slaves. Armed with such information, slaves might force masters to broadcast not sales but flights. ¹⁴

Table III
Advertisements (N = 1,487) that Gave Seller's Name, Boston, 1704–1781.

Sources: Boston News-Letter, 1704–1720; Boston Gazette, 1719–1781.

In short, as the newspaper trade matured and as masters came to realize that their control of print, like their control over slaves, had limits, more than a few sellers probably learned the hard way to keep a lid on impending sales by keeping their names out of the paper. Sellers' determination to keep hidden their identities gained added impetus in the 1760s, when popular opinion turned decidedly against slave trading. Many masters continued to defend and exercise their customary right to sell slave property even on the eve of emancipation in Massachusetts. At the same time, a variety of factors compelled them to do so anonymously, including fear that slaves might bolt before being sold and desire to avoid public scrutiny and censure. Significantly, sellers could remain nameless only because printers voluntarily doubled as matchmakers. More than half of all advertisements bid customers to "Inquire of the Printer"; two out of three notices in the Gazette required buyers to do so. Scholars have long understood printers' role in facilitating the exchange of a wide variety of goods and services, not just slaves, but slave traders seem to have utilized the service more than other advertisers, and printers' mediating function made them by proxy the most active slave traders in Boston. It also made the printing office the busiest slave mart in town.¹⁵

Overall, two-thirds of the slaves advertised for sale were between the ages of sixteen and thirty, though slaves aged over thirty and ten or younger composed increased shares of the total after 1740 . Males made up 60 percent of the print slave market, a figure comparable to their preponderance at midcentury in the larger black populations of both Boston and Massachusetts at large. Neither the sex ratio of male to female slaves nor the average age ( 19.6 ) of advertised slaves changed substantially over time (see Table IV). A third of the advertisements ran for only a week; 95 percent ran for three weeks or less. Most sellers included a short description of slaves' physical characteristics, ranging from sex to medical background, often accompanied by an equally brief and usually enthusiastic character assessment (see Table V). The terminology used to describe slave bodies included "able," "strong," "stout," "sturdy," "strait-limb'd," "hardy," "brisk," "spry," "active," or simply "valuable," a seemingly vague term that epitomized what all the other specifications really meant. Endorsements of slaves' dispositions included "quiet," "faithful," "agreeable," "handy," "ingenius," "tractable," "industrious," "neat," "good natur'd," and "good temper'd." Audacious sellers glossed over slaves' more obvious limitations. In 1743 , one master offered a "Negro Fellow, fit for many Sorts of Work" who had only one leg, assuring readers that "by making use of wooden one" the man remained "capable of doing considerable Business." In the interest of selling slaves, though, sometimes it paid to be less specific, as one slaveowner learned in May 1760 , when he or she advertised a "remarkably healthy, and strong" slave woman, "about Twenty Eight Years of Age." Most sellers stopped there. This one added that the woman in question had "a furious Temper, and [was] somewhat lazy" and that "smart Discipline would make her a very good Servant," a candid assessment of a slave Bostonians avoided if they could. Perhaps realizing as much, the seller removed the section about bad traits when the advertisement ran again a week later. ¹⁶

Table IV
Demographic Profile of Slaves Advertised for Sale, Boston, 1720–1781.

Sources: Boston News-Letter, 1704–1720; Boston Gazette, 1719–1781.

Some traders doubtless engaged in unscrupulous advertising practices, safe in the knowledge that courts and lawmakers offered buyers little relief. In 1762, for instance, when Captain John Sale sold John Oliver two men who turned out to be free, Oliver sued. James Otis, Jr., defended Sale, arguing that his client had not made and was not required to make "express Warranty" of the men's status to Oliver, who had taken upon himself the gamble of "their ever getting free." Otis's appeal lacked the swagger he would embrace just two years later, when in the course of asserting the rights of Englishmen in Massachusetts he paused long enough to call all slave traders tyrants. Nonetheless, Otis and Sale prevailed, as the judge "directed the Jury to find Defendant Costs." Though it no doubt disappointed Oliver, the decision probably surprised no one. Caveat emptor had always been rule number one of slave trading in Massachusetts.¹⁷

Table V
Information Contained in Slave-for-Sale Advertisements, Boston, 1704–1781.

Sources: Boston News-Letter, 1704–1720; Boston Gazette, 1719–1781.

Provincial lawmakers reinforced that principle five years later, tabling a bill "to prevent frauds in the sale of Negroes." Smart buyers therefore took sellers' claims with a grain of skepticism, realizing that they could get away with being less than honest about slaves' general health and personality, work habits and abilities, and especially ages. On the other hand, nobody did business with dishonest merchants more than once, and the master who broadcast his slave's ship's carpentry skills invited trouble if on being sold the slave proved unable even to find his way to Clark's Shipyard. Therefore most slave sellers probably did not resort to egregious lying, a smattering of cheats and swindlers notwithstanding.¹⁸

Sellers actually adopted a number of strategies to encourage good faith. Importers sometimes retained newly arrived slaves for a period of "seasoning" that shielded buyers against unhealthy slaves. In February 1737, Daniel Gosse auctioned "three likely Negro Women and one Negro Boy," all of whom had "been in the Country about 4 Months, so that they have had the Winter for a Seasoning." (Such a sales pitch simultaneously reassured buyers and allowed Gosse to rationalize why the slaves had not been sold the year before.) Individual masters sometimes guaranteed slaves to be "sound, and in good health," especially during outbreaks of diseases like smallpox and measles. Others let slaves out on trial. On December 18, 1738, the owner of a twenty-year-old slave woman offered her "for a Month" so that prospective buyers could judge for themselves the veracity of the claim that the woman worked "tollerably well with her Needle." Similarly, on November 11, 1734, the owner of a "very Honest Negro Young Man" offered "him out a few Days on Trial, provided he likes the purchaser." If this latter example leaves unclear whether master or slave had the final say on potential buyers, it still illustrates how trial periods may have helped ensure smooth sales by permitting slaves and new owners to test each other, thereby protecting the interests of buyers, sellers, and slaves, if not all equally.¹⁹

Even when slaves performed work in ways new masters deemed deficient, sellers may not have lied. Some did. But some slaves probably exaggerated or faked ineptitude in order to escape owners and work settings not to their liking, an indirect method of asserting control over the circumstances of bondage. Aversion to rural life may help explain why one twenty-two-year-old bondwoman, offered "on Trial for a Month or six Weeks" and reputedly "as good a House Negro as any in America," proved utterly "incapable of Country work" after her master moved out of the city in 1773. Perhaps the woman could not adjust to rural labor, as her owner claimed. Real differences existed between urban and rural as well as "Indoor and Outdoor" work, and many masters emphasized slaves' suitability for one setting over the other. On the other hand, many slaves simply preferred life in Boston. Not-so-subtle manifestations of "incompetence" may have enabled this woman to return to a more agreeable urban milieu. In July 1758 one enslaved man essentially forced his own sale on an owner who claimed he "would take no Money for him if he could be content to live with him in the Country."²⁰

Purchasers cried foul most often, not over allegedly false claims about skills, health, age, or other attributes, but rather when a new-bought slave asserted his or her free status, as in the aforementioned case of Oliver v. Sale. Similar suits occurred in Massachusetts more and more often after 1760, by which time, as Otis told the court in 1762 and much to the chagrin of slave traffickers, it had become increasingly "impossible . . . to know whether" people of color in Massachusetts were "free or not." It became even more difficult in the years ahead. Nonetheless, that the selling of slaves in print continued into the early 1780s serves powerfully to suggest that the practice worked well enough, most of the time.²¹

Like fugitive slave advertisements, those that offered slaves for sale developed into a print genre that generally conformed to standards of diction, length, and style established early in the century.²² Whether they told the truth about the slaves they pitched, most sellers kept to the formula and kept it simple. Any number of bare-bones advertisements read like this one from August 1742: "To be sold, a likely Negro Boy, about sixteen Years of Age, inquire of Mr. Benjamin Stoaks, living near Charlestown Ferry." All the same, in print sellers like Stoaks strove to publicize slaves with all the casual indifference of any other market exchange. Saddle-tree maker Arthur Gale advertised "A likely Young Horse of 16 Hands high suitable for Saddle or Chaise" alongside "a Likely Negro Man fit for Town or Country" in May 1735. With the right bid anyone at the Sun Tavern by five o'clock in the afternoon on August 4, 1726, could have left with a dead man's assortment of quilts, blankets, silk and worsted hose, corks, breeches, "Fine Hats," and "sundry other Goods" that included, without fanfare, "One Negro Man." Though slaves sometimes shattered sellers' detachment, for the most part print, besides widening the circle of slaveholders and thus helping to keep the apparatuses of slavery in Massachusetts churning along, allowed masters to depersonalize what could be a complicated human experience. In perhaps the most striking marker of this commodification, masters identified by name only two of the roughly 2,500 black men, women, and children they advertised.²³

Hardly an impersonal event, sale would have been cruelly familiar to slaves, many of whom changed owners more than once in their lifetime. In August 1762, a master accentuated the claim that his "sober" slave had lived "all the Time, except whilst in the Importers hands, in one Gentleman's Family." The eighteen-year-old youth had only "been in America" for "3 years." As Governor Dudley told the Board of Trade in 1708, "the Winter halfe year" in Massachusetts often rendered "not so Serviceable" slaves who had to be fed, clothed, and sheltered whether they worked or not. Nothing of note had changed about the weather in New England by 1764, when an essayist in the Newport Mercury reiterated that "long winters prevent the labor of slaves being of any advantage" in northerly climes. That climatic truth and other seasonal and short-term work patterns, in agriculture and in industries such as sugar refining and rum distilling, induced masters to hire out slaves, sometimes for long stretches at a time, or to sell them. Twenty-nine-year-old Cyrus, for instance, had already served at least four different Massachusetts masters before running away from the fifth in September 1748.²⁴

For-sale notices, though they obviously represent only a fraction of actual sales, offer a rough guide to the numbers of Massachusetts slaves who changed hands each year. From 1715 to 1719, the News-Letter carried an average of about thirty-two for-sale advertisements per year, one for roughly every nine slaves in Boston. In part that ratio, the highest in any five-year span, may be inflated by lack of competition, for, as noted above, after 1720 sellers could choose among at least three weeklies. At the same time, a fair number of masters probably did have slaves "to be disposed of" in the last half of the 1710s, thanks to a temporary increase in white immigration, and especially to the severe recession that gripped Boston following the end of Queen Anne's War in 1713. It would not be the last time that war and economic volatility altered the course of slavery in Massachusetts.²⁵

When the Boston News-Letter carried its first slave-for-sale notice in 1704, slavery had already existed in Massachusetts for more than six decades. The Puritans began to import enslaved Africans no later than 1638, and enthusiasts such as Emanuel Downing, John Winthrop's brother-in-law, had become convinced by the 1640s that the Bay colonists could not thrive without "a stock of slaves sufficient to doe all our business." Even slavery's backers had their confidence in the system easily shaken, however. Nagged by doubts about the ultimate efficacy of slave labor in a town setting, Bostonians in particular were also troubled, perhaps peculiarly so, by what Samuel Sewall in 1700 called "the Numerousness of Slaves" among them. Though a French visitor in 1687 thought that "not a House in Boston [existed], however small may be its Means," without "one or two" black slaves, they probably composed no more than about 3 percent of the town's inhabitants at any time before 1720. Fear of strangers so different from themselves in terms of "Conditions, Colour, and Hair" gave white Bostonians like Sewall pause and helped keep slave numbers low, as did fears, possibly exaggerated but not wholly unfounded, of insurrection. In 1690, officials implicated two local slaves, one a "negro," the other an Indian, in the plan of a New Jersey white named Isaac Morrill to incite slave rebellion in Newbury, Massachusetts, escape to Canada, and attack the northern frontier in league with the French. Exposed, the plan came to nothing; nevertheless, it and less extreme manifestations of "Uneasiness . . . under their Slavery" showed blacks to be most "Unwilling Servants," as Sewall put the matter. The governor estimated that some 200 slaves arrived in Boston between June 1698 and the end of 1707.²⁶

Even that small trickle of slaves sparked social and economic concerns that ignited in a public backlash against slavery and specifically against "Negros." Sewall fanned the flames with The Selling of Joseph (1700), a stinging moral and legal condemnation of the slave trade that accused white Bostonians of holding no better title to their slaves than if some "stronger Party" sold them "for Slaves to a Ship outward bound." Sewall later confided that he garnered nothing but many "frowns and hard words" for claiming "that all Men . . . have equal Right unto Liberty." Nearly three-quarters of a century would pass before such notions gained wide currency. In 1700, most white Bostonians did generally agree that white laborers, preferably English ones, besides making more governable servants, made better Indian fighters and eventually added to the colony's wealth as freeholders and families in ways that lifelong slaves did not. White Bostonians also tended to believe that "Negroes" were "much addicted to Stealing, Lying and Purloining." Such was the opinion expressed in the first editorial in American newspaper history, published in the News-Letter in June 1706, a piece that may have been penned by Sewall himself, whose antislavery stance apparently did not preclude, and indeed seems to have been partly informed by, racial antipathy.²⁷

Between 1698 and 1705, the general assembly enacted a flurry of legislation regarding slavery and black slaves: it barred all persons from buying or receiving goods from slaves; required masters to post bond before freeing slaves (more to prevent blacks from becoming town charges than to discourage manumissions); stipulated that any slave found abroad after nine at night or at any time without permission could be whipped and jailed; forbade interracial marriages; targeted for sale out of the province any "Negroes or Molattoes" found guilty of fornication with whites; and provided for the laying of the lash upon any Negro or mulatto who struck a white person. Capping these prohibitive efforts, provincial lawmakers in 1705 established a duty of four pounds per head on all blacks imported, in an effort to encourage immigration of white servants instead.²⁸

The duty, which delegates from Boston had been instructed to support since 1701, failed in one important respect. Few whites came, and by decade's end Massachusetts Bay colonists found themselves supplementing the local labor force with shipments of angry Yamasee Indian war captives from the Carolinas.²⁹ As they explored other labor sources, white Bostonians did little to encourage much if any growth in African numbers in the twenty years before 1720; in fact, the black presence in Boston may have diminished in those two decades. In 1708, Dudley had put the number of "Negro Servants" in Boston at about 400, one-half of whom he said had been born there, with another 150 or so slaves scattered throughout the rest of the province. By 1720, when Massachusetts masters probably owned more than 2,000 slaves (including Indians), Bostonians still owned only about 300–400.³⁰

Countervailing portents of expansion did exist. Irish merchant Thomas Amory quipped on arriving in Boston in 1720 or 1721 that "good servants" were "scarce to be had" and therefore that "no one sells, but endeavours to buy." When the economy picked up in the early 1720s, Bostonians found themselves in "great Want of Servants," as a contributor to the New-England Courant, echoing Amory's earlier remark, observed in 1725. Years of fighting Spaniards, French, and Indians had not helped matters. At least one-fifth of all able-bodied males in Massachusetts, including many urban laborers, served in Queen Anne's War alone. A quarter of them never returned. An outbreak of smallpox in 1721 had a more immediately devastating impact, killing one in twelve Bostonians, including as much as a third of the town's enslaved workforce. The annual account of mortality in Boston reported 134 black burials and 968 whites in 1721; before the pox abated, 98 "Indians and Negroes" and 734 whites died from September through November alone.³¹ It was not true, as one local exclaimed in 1723, after a series of fires piqued fears of a black "combination to burn and destroy the town," that Bostonians would "rather be burnt in their beds by [Negroes] than suffer English servants to come hither to work."³² More accurately, when too few white workers came, Bostonians compensated for the recurrent problem of labor shortage by importing black slaves.³³ In the twenty years after 1720, while Boston's white population doubled, the town's black population increased fourfold to about 1,400. By the early 1740s, slaves had increased from about 3 to about 10 percent of the population of Boston, where one in five families now owned slaves.³⁴

The busiest period of slave importing in the history of Massachusetts occurred in the late 1720s and early 1730s. In the parlance of the day, merchants routinely called shipments of slaves "parcels." From 1725 through 1729, the Gazette announced the intended sale of thirty-two separate parcels of slaves. Parcels constituted an even greater share of slave-for-sale advertisements, roughly 29 percent, during the period 1730–1734, when sellers marketed twenty-seven more. From 1735 to 1739, the number of slave parcels tapered off to ten, a figure that is impressive in its own right, considering that traders hawked just twelve more parcels of slaves in the Gazette in all the years after 1739 combined. All told, parcels accounted for about one-fifth of slave-for-sale notices in the fifteen years before 1740, and just under a quarter of the advertisements, 1725–1734. By way of comparison, slave parcels never represented more than 6 percent of slave-for-sale notices in any half-decade after 1739.

Information about slave origins corroborates the efflorescence of importing in the late 1720 s and 1730 s. Some 80–90 percent of all slaves described as "newly arrived" (or words to that effect) appeared for sale between 1725 and 1739 . Notwithstanding the "parcel of choice Negro Slaves" that Captain Samuel Lancelott "brought from Affrica" in 1730 and a shipment of slaves "lately Imported from Guinea" in 1737 , most of the slaves who came to Boston before 1740 did not come directly from Africa. Rather, they had journeyed "by way of the West Indies," where New Englanders maintained strong trading ties and where they hoped native Africans had become "seasoned" to new disease and work environments, a process that often included achieving some fluency with English. Slaves taken from the West Indies outnumbered those from Africa approximately 135 to thirty-seven in this period. From the 1740 s on sellers rarely noted slaves' West Indian background, which perhaps reveals less about the personal histories or the collective acculturation of Massachusetts slaves than it does about whites' social expectations and the descriptive language they reserved for new arrivals. Whatever the case, 80 percent of all slaves identified as "West Indian" appeared for sale in the 1725–1739 period (see Table VI).

Slaves from Barbados, where, as one late eighteenth-century writer put it, "the inhabitants of Massachusetts were much connected," had always counted prominently among imports to New England. They continued to do so in the 1720s and 1730s. Barbadian Benony Waterman emigrated to Boston in 1726 and sent home for slaves in four of the next eight slaving seasons, including "a parcel of young Negroes lately arrived from Barbados" in July 1729. Family connections similarly helped Hugh Hall transform the sea route from Barbados to Boston into an ocean of opportunity. Hall marketed West Indian slaves six times in the fourteen months from July 1727 to September 1728; in 1729 he imported eighty Barbadians, many of whom he resold to middlemen like Nathaniel Cunningham and Daniel Gosse. Slaves of Barbadian provenance may have constituted a third or more of Massachusetts imports in the 1720s and 1730s.³⁵

Table VI
Known Foreign Origins of Slaves Advertised for Sale, Boston, 1704–1781.

* Three slaves from Bermuda counted as West Indians for 1735–1739.

Sources: Boston News-Letter, 1704–1720; Boston Gazette, 1719–1781.

No matter where they came from, newly imported West Indians and Africans represented at least 40 and perhaps more than 70 percent of all slaves sold in the Gazette before 1740, with West Indians outnumbering Africans by more than three to one.³⁶ Their combined presence lent critical mass and an expansive Afro-West Indian flavor to emergent black society and culture in New England. Occasionally, the press offered glimpses of customs, practices, and beliefs the slaves carried from Africa and the West Indies and adapted to life in New England. The bodies of many runaways displayed visible reminders of Africa. When Caesar Swift absconded from H.M.S. Lyme in November 1728, his master noted the "3 Scars" he bore "on each Cheek"; when Jack ran from Boston wig maker Edward Langdon on a February morning in 1732, Langdon recorded that his "upper teeth" were "artificially made sharp." Concerned mainly with recouping their slaves, neither owner expressed appreciation for the deep cultural meanings of these ritualized markings. To Caesar and Jack, though, scarification and filed teeth symbolized not servility but having come of age in Africa, and served as reminders of communal bonds that stretched across the deep to lands where they expected to return, and to people whose spirits remained with them.³⁷ In May 1733, the Gazette told the story of a slave woman in Salem who, apparently wishing to hasten the awaited reunion, enacted what appears to have been an African-inspired graveside reincarnation ritual. "Determined to go into her own Country, as she call'd it," the woman "took a Bottle of Rum & two Biskets . . . into the Burying Place . . . where she dug a hole & cover'd em" before taking her own life with a knife. Seven years later, the Boston Evening-Post reported the suicide of a Boston slave who, before dying, divulged that he too "had a Mind to go to his own Country again." In 1737, a "valuable Negro Man" was working on his master's farm in Roxbury when he cut and then drowned himself in a pond. Like the Ibo suicides described by a nineteenth-century southern slave and recorded by the Georgia Writers Project, this man probably believed that he could "mahch right down in duh ribbuh tuh mach back to Africa."³⁸

Cultural survivals and adaptations such as these both informed the lives and the deaths of individual Africans in New England and shaped Afro-New England community life. As early as 1721 and on numerous occasions thereafter, Boston attempted to limit "Disorders" stemming from black funeral processions that zig-zagged across town and into the night. These burial practices, which reportedly attracted as many as 270 participants at a time when blacks numbered no more than about 400, seem to have been an adaptation of meandering funeral corteges common in West Africa. Whites reckoned them at best a "great Inconveniency," as they did most other black congregations. Historian and folklorist William D. Piersen estimated that two-thirds of the eighty Barbadian slaves imported by Hugh Hall in 1729 retained African day names. These and other creolized Africans were the ones who developed and participated in the celebrations of black kings and governors, also known as election-day festivals, that flourished in many New England seaport towns by midcentury. Not coincidentally, election-day celebrations emerged as a syncretic cornerstone of black communal life in eighteenth-century New England in the years following the importations of the late 1720s and 1730s. The influx of foreign-born slaves breathed life into Afro-Yankee culture.³⁹

Little is known about slave preferences in colonial Massachusetts, though locals clearly had few options outside of purchasing what they could get from merchants such as Jacob Royall, Benony Waterman, Hugh Hall, and others with ties to specific island markets. Likewise, when New Englanders bought new Africans they generally chose from slaves imported according to supply and demand factors beyond their immediate control. This does not mean that New Englanders received "refuse" slaves; small shipments of healthy young slaves were the rule. Prohibitive costs and much smaller market size dictated, however, that northern employers could not compete with the tobacco, rice, and sugar growers to the south. But such limitations did not totally preclude choice. Like other slaveholding British colonials, Bostonians formed opinions about blacks from the various West Indian islands and about slaves imported from different African regions. Experience, Atlantic hearsay, and, at least for those directly involved in the slave trade, a keen sense of what kinds of slaves other colonists fancied and why, informed such notions. Significantly, so did newspaper reports that enabled New Englanders to guard against influxes of rebels from the latest island trouble spot. Along with personal and business ties, white perceptions might have helped sustain the market for slaves from Barbados. For what it was worth, as the New England press reported one slave conspiracy after another in the West Indies, particularly in Jamaica, Barbados remained relatively free from slave "Mischief."⁴⁰

Savvy enough in their own right, Bostonians of the 1720s and 1730s probably would have agreed with the Virginian who wrote in 1725 that, in a pinch, "if they are young likely Negroes it's not a farthing matter where they come from." In 1738, Peter Faneuil summed up the preferences of many Bostonians, asking Captain Peter Buckley to procure for him "as likely, a strait limbed [West Indian] Negro lad as possible you can about the age of from 12 to fiveteen years." The slaves imported before 1740 averaged about fifteen years of age on arrival, four to five years younger than the average age of all advertised slaves. And, while the majority of slaving vessels sailed into Boston in the 1720s and 1730s carrying mixed groups of young "men, women, and boys," overall males predominated. Exact figures prove elusive, but nine of twenty-seven slave shipments delineated by sex consisted of all males, compared to just one all-female shipment. Thus, though New Englanders frequently complained that slaves brought "from the West Indies, [were] Usually the worst Servants they have," purchasers such as Faneuil stood a good chance of getting the young male slaves they wanted from one of the islands in the 1720s and 1730s.⁴¹

Perhaps the surge in Boston's slave importing would have ended by 1730 had a second devastating go-round with the smallpox in that year not claimed the lives of roughly another 400 townspeople. This time the death toll among slaves, many of them recent arrivals, exceeded the epidemic of 1721. Boston's annual mortality report listed 160 black deaths in 1730, the most in any single year until 1752. If the second disastrous bout in nine years with smallpox generated short-term demand for labor, it also helps explain increased demand in the early 1730s for West Indian slaves who had already survived the disease. Fears that slaves might contract or spread the pox lingered even after outbreaks subsided, making smallpox immunity a chief slave-selling point. In the months surrounding the 1730 epidemic, thirteen records, six times the normal yearly average, mentioned that slaves had already "had the Small-Pox in Barbados" or elsewhere in the West Indies.⁴²

Smallpox or not, the import trade slackened markedly over the course of the 1730s. Approximately 194 slaves of identifiably foreign origin had been sold in the Gazette between 1725 and 1729, compared to 140 from 1730 to 1734 and only 60 from 1735 to 1739. By decade's end, the peak years of slave importing in Massachusetts had passed. Even at its height, and even though in human terms it probably accounted for nearly half of all slaves ever marketed in the Gazette, the import slave trade in Massachusetts from 1725 to 1739 never assumed major proportions. On one hand, ships with as many as twenty and more slaves docked at Boston on numerous occasions in the 1720s and 1730s. In September 1727, for instance, the sloop Katherine arrived from Barbados with twenty-five slaves on board—children and adults, males and females. Two years later, Hugh Hall entered the arrival of twenty-three more Barbadian slaves via Captain Peter King, along with smaller parcels of sixteen with Captain Grafton, twelve with Captain Forster, and eleven by way of Captain Laist in his account book. No revisionist gymnastics, however, could or should transform Massachusetts's growing but never sizable slave contingent into the black majority of South Carolina, where anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 slaves arrived annually from the late 1720s through the 1730s.⁴³

Slave shipments such as those cited above, relatively small to begin with, rarely made it into the newspaper intact. ⁴⁴ The parcels that appeared for sale in the Gazette before 1740 probably averaged no more than seven slaves apiece, a figure that itself exaggerates by a good deal the overall scale of Boston's newspaper slave trade. ⁴⁵ As Table VII shows, just four of 1,393 advertisements that specified the number of slaves to be sold offered as many as nine or ten, and only one notice concerned more than ten slaves (it announced the forthcoming auction of nineteen Africans in Newport, not Boston). That three of these five placements date from the 1720 s says as much about the outer limits of the trade at its apogee as it does about the generally modest scope of slave trading in Massachusetts. Comparatively small slave sales, the corollary of small slaveholdings, remained the rule in Massachusetts, where even during the heaviest years of importing, 1725–1734 , the average number of slaves per advertisement barely exceeded three (see Table VIII). ⁴⁶

Nevertheless, local historian Samuel G. Drake had it right in 1856 when he wrote that "the traffic in Slaves appears to have been more an object in Boston" in the second half of the 1720s "than at any period before or since." Increased demand played a vital role in that development, as Massachusetts whites, alternately laying aside or attempting to legislate away misgivings about black slaves, imported unprecedented numbers of them to work in their shops and homes, aboard their ships, along their wharves, and on their farms. Perhaps this sudden enthusiasm for slave labor compels special emphasis, given the persistent view, carefully cultivated in later years by New Englanders themselves, that they accumulated slaves as an inevitable and undesirable result of trading with and supplying slaves to West Indian plantation regimes. In the 1720s and 1730s, whites in Massachusetts mapped out an economic future in which slaves played a heightened role, and they did so by design.⁴⁷

Table VII
Number of Slaves Advertised for Sale, Boston, 1704–1781.

Sources: Boston News-Letter, 1704–1720; Boston Gazette, 1720–1781.

At the same time, Massachusetts slavery did not exist outside the larger rhythms of the Atlantic world economy or of the British Atlantic system of bonded labor, which is to say that demand-side explanations tell only part of the story. If for a moment slaves became an attractive source of labor to Bostonians, a protracted slump in the Caribbean sugar economy beginning in the 1720s had made them a viable alternative in the first place. In 1732, a West Indian correspondent to the short-lived Rhode Island Gazette observed that the "Inhabitants of Barbados" were deserting fast and liquidating "their Slaves and Effects, owing to the low Price of Sugar." Without this supply of relatively cheap and obtainable slaves, economic development in Boston might have proceeded much differently and more fitfully, to say nothing of either the evolution of Afro-New England society or slavery itself.⁴⁸

Table VIII
Number of Slaves per Advertisement, Boston, 1704–1781.

Sources: Boston News-Letter, 1704–1720; Boston Gazette, 1719–1781.

A number of scholars have noted the conspicuous peacetime expansion of the slave trade and slavery throughout colonial British America in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Patterns of slavery's growth in Massachusetts in the 1720s and 1730s locate that province squarely in the mainstream of slaveholding trends up and down the mainland, particularly in other northern cities such as Philadelphia and New York. Gary Nash identified "a period of relatively heavy imports" in Philadelphia in the early 1730s, after which slave trafficking "slackened considerably." James Lydon's study of the slave trade to New York suggests that West Indian importations concentrated most heavily in that city around the years from about 1725 to 1735. Each of these trends paralleled developments in Boston with a precision that speaks to the vitality and interconnectedness of a rising intra-American urban market for slaves.⁴⁹ In short, the entrenchment of slavery in Massachusetts in the 1720s and 1730s emerged out of the confluence of several internal and external factors and mirrored patterns of the institution's enlargement elsewhere in roughly the same years and for many of the same reasons, notably a period of general though unpredictable prosperity and growth, stable slave prices, the absence of major military entanglements, and the remarkable escalation of the Atlantic slave trade following the Peace of Utrecht.⁵⁰

The landscape of slavery and of slave trading in Massachusetts underwent fundamental change in the two decades after 1740. By the mid-1750s, some 1,500 slaves lived in Boston, an increase of fewer than 200 since 1742, as the return of imperial war and declining economic fortunes dealt a double blow to both the supply of imported slaves and local demand for slave labor.⁵¹ In contrast to the fifteen years before 1740, when as many as 70 percent of all slaves marketed in the Boston Gazette were new arrivals, recent imports made up no more than about 10 percent of slaves marketed from 1745 to 1759. The majority of the entrepreneurial merchants and ship's captains who had sustained the import trade of previous years abandoned the scene; the role of the few who remained shifted to redistributing slaves already in Massachusetts, one or two at a time. In 1743, when the owner of an eighteen-year-old slave girl had no luck selling her in the Gazette, he turned the transaction over to John Gerrish, a middleman who offered her on consignment "at public or private sale."⁵²

Table IX
Number of Advertisements per Seller Identified by Name, Boston, 1720–1779.

Source: Boston Gazette, 1720–1779.

As importing waned, the newspaper slave trade became almost entirely internal, dominated by private sellers like rope-maker Edward Gray, cordwainer John Boidwen, and "Wm. Owen, Taylor," masters whose involvement with the market seems often to have ended on parting ways with slaves purchased from merchant-importers just years before (see Table IX). In late 1743 , one slaveowner offered a thirty-three-year-old slave woman who had "been in the Country ten Years"; a year later another owner offered "a Negro Man about 22 or 23 Years Old" who had been imported about " 12 Years" before. By the 1750 s, sales of creole slaves—born "in this Country" or "in Boston"—outnumbered slave parcels. Largely intracolonial, the newspaper slave trade in Massachusetts was in one respect decidedly sluggish for most of the 1740 s and 1750 s. Not until the late 1760 s did sellers have to repeat their advertisements longer on average than they had in the 1740 s, and slaves sold slowly for most of the 1750 s as well. One master touted his slave's unmatched prowess "with a Scythe, Ax and Teem" for an unprecedented nine straight weeks from March through June 1758 . Despite slow sales, Massachusetts masters demonstrated their slave-selling resolve by placing 226 different notices in the Gazette in the 1740 s, the most in any decade (and many issues from 1742 have been lost). In sharp contrast to previous years, in the 1740 s more than nine of ten notices offered just one or two slaves. From 1725 to 1739 nearly a third had included more than two. ⁵³

A monthly breakdown of slave sales sheds additional light on the changed local slave market. Heavy or light, Boston's slave importing season lasted from late spring to early autumn, with July and August the busiest months.⁵⁴ From 1725 to 1729, the biggest years of slave importing, 67 percent of all slave-for-sale advertisements appeared between May and October. From the late 1730s through the early 1750s, however, fewer than half the notices appeared in those months, and a seasonal trend toward winter sales emerged. Starting in 1735 and lasting until 1754, fully a quarter of advertisements appeared in December, January, and February. Since sellers marketed recently imported slaves only three times in those months and since winter had always been the season when masters most often found black labor superfluous and the costs of maintaining slaves prohibitive, it seems clear that private owners who could not or chose not to keep slaves in the months of cold and snow accounted for the expanded winter market.

In part the critical weakness of the paper money Massachusetts had issued in piles since early in the century helps explain these developments. As the colony's long-simmering fiscal crisis boiled to a head, "want of cash," as a number of sellers described their predicament, convinced many masters to seek a going price for their slaves and to demand payment in hard money. In 1746, Charles Apthorp, venerable slave importer and one of the wealthiest men in Boston, observed that "our Currency is very bad and I think must be worse." By 1749, the sterling value of Massachusetts paper money had plummeted to one-tenth of its face, and even affluent slave-sellers like Apthorp, who early in the decade had been willing to offer slaves on "Credit upon good security," began to insist that buyers come with "ready money" in hand. Fiscal troubles hinted at the deep structural problems of an economy, reliant on credits earned in the carrying trade, that took a heavy hit as the foreign sector entered a period of long-term decline. As early as 1736, the Boston Town Meeting griped that "Trade to the West Indies and back" languished. Six years later a Bostonian complained that "Trade in general" stood "not above One half" what it had been even in 1735, adding that it continued to wane. Though scholars disagree about the overall trajectory of economic growth and development in Boston in the mid-eighteenth century, slave-trading patterns suggest that grousing Bostonians whose livelihoods depended on participation in a volatile Atlantic market economy had good reason to fear for their economic health in the 1740s and 1750s.⁵⁵

Along with economic stagnation, hyperinflation, and a heavy wartime tax burden, underemployed and idle slaves posed an especially thorny problem for masters. In many ways a sales pitch from March 1740 set the tone for the next twenty years, offering "A likely Negro Girl about 18" not because her master needed the money nor because she was "addicted to any thing ill," but rather on account of her "Owner having no Occasion for her." Though seasonal fluctuations in slave employment had always been the rule in Massachusetts, no previous seller had rationalized a slave sale that way; in subsequent years, dozens of masters in town and country alike explained that lack of steady work had forced their hands. If anything, employment prospects for slaves worsened in the 1750s. Forty-four out of fifty-three sellers who provided a reason for proposed slave sales in the 1750s cited "want of employ," a phrase that became both mantra and lament of the market. Fully a quarter of all advertisements from the 1750s included words to the effect that slaves were out of work.⁵⁶

Though upstart Rhode Islanders' quick rise to dominance of the African slave trade pushed many Massachusetts slavers out of that business, locally owned ships still occasionally returned carrying small contingents of (increasingly African) slaves. Captain Robert Ball, for one, put in with "four fine likely Gold Coast Negroes" in March 1748. The rest of Ball's words read more like an apology than a hard sell, signifying the extent to which demand for slaves in and around Boston had diminished. He explained: "All which Negroes the Seller who was the Importer chose out of a considerable Number . . . to carry to a Southern Colony"; changing his mind and "having several more" than he needed, Ball attempted instead to "dispose of the above [in Boston]." It seems more likely that Ball became just another Bostonian with more slaves than he knew what to do with.⁵⁷

As an alternative to outright sale, masters resorted with increasing frequency to hiring slaves out, a strategy that allowed them to put money in their pockets while retaining nominal ownership of slaves they did not need or could not support. But the benefits of hiring came at the cost of a subtle erosion of masters' control over mobile and more autonomous slaves, who parlayed the social capital they gained on the job into dynamic new understandings of their status, the value of their labor, and the possibilities for freedom. In 1761, an enslaved Bostonian named Cesar, though "frequently seen" in "some of the neighbouring Towns," avoided being taken up "as a Runaway" by telling people "he was there Working for his Master." As economic woes urged masters to alter their slaves' work arrangements, the actions of daring bondmen like Cesar brought them closer to the realization that hired hands fit their variable labor needs more efficiently than did bonded ones.⁵⁸

As early as 1725, a writer in the New-England Courant had cautioned Bostonians about "going much above themselves" in their zeal for slaves. Despite such admonitions, optimistic over-investment in slaves in the flush importing years of the 1720s and 1730s probably played a role in the subsequent reversal of the next twenty years. At the same time, black families that grew despite both a skewed sex ratio and the physical isolation occasioned by masters' small holdings and whether masters wanted them to contributed to what was beginning to look by the end of the 1730s like an overabundance of slaves. In March 1738, Robert Temple advertised an enslaved man, his wife, and their son, "the main reason" being his belief that the couple would continue to add "one [child] every Year" for "Many Years to come" to a household already "Overstocked with Servants of that Colour." Two months later, "a Certain Person in Town" offered to "Sell or Exchange for a Negro Boy" a female slave "who promises to be as good a Breeder, as any one can well desire, and to afford [the buyer's] Family a greater stock then he cares for." Masters parted with black children who did little or no work on the easiest of terms. During the 1740s alone, eighteen owners offered slave children "to be given away"; in all previous years combined, just two such notices had appeared. Though some sellers insisted on preserving family units, masters' attempts to limit black fecundity helped ensure that the future of slave labor in Massachusetts would depend in part, and as it had before, on infusions from elsewhere. Not that the future looked bright in early 1742 to such masters as the one who tried to give away "a Negro Male Child, about three Weeks old." No one had claimed the infant a month and a half later. In short, as thick clouds of economic austerity settled over Boston, it hardly mattered to the vast majority of employers that war and competition had stalled the import slave trade. For most of the 1740s and 1750s even Robert Ball's four Gold Coast slaves might have struck most Massachusetts whites as four more than they could either afford or gainfully employ.⁵⁹

In the 1740s and for most of the 1750s, war and economic downturn challenged whites' commitment to the institution of slavery, and they wavered. Despite these recent troubles, Bostonians celebrated victory in the Seven Years' War by introducing a new generation of foreign-born blacks to slavery in America. Victory in the north seemed imminent in July 1758, when a parcel of boys and girls "imported from Africa" ushered in the most intense period of slave importation since the 1730s. By the early 1760s, a number of employers appears to have been less concerned with finding work for slaves than with finding the right slave for the job, as Gazette subscribers placed a third of all the "slave wanted" notices that ever appeared in that paper in the nine years between 1756 and 1764. An advertisement from March 1762 offered "a likely Negro girl, between 14 and 15 Years of Age . . . only [for] the want of a larger Negro." In July 1765, a Gazette patron offered to exchange a "healthy Negro Boy, about 14 or 15 Years of Age" for "a Negro Man, between 20 and 25" to "work upon a Farm" outside of town. Two eager buyers even placed advertisements stressing their willingness to "give a good price" to obtain the slaves they wanted. One of the spendthrifts was Antiguan émigré Isaac Royall, whose slave-trading experience in the 1750s and 1760s epitomized the tendencies of the day much as the slaving activities of his brother Jacob had in the 1720s and 1730s. In early 1752, Royall, under economic duress, decided to cut his losses, leasing his country estate and selling the slave family of four that ran it for him. A decade later, in April 1762, he re-entered the market, this time to hire an overseer who understood "the Management of Negroes," specifically the retinue of slaves who worked his farm in Medford, Massachusetts. Times had changed.⁶⁰

Two general phenomena distinguished this slaving groundswell from its predecessor. First, it involved nowhere near the numbers of slaves as the larger wave of the 1720s and 1730s. Second, the overwhelming majority of slaves who came to Boston in the late 1750s and especially the early 1760s arrived direct from Africa, "snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat," as the poet Phillis Wheatley later described her own passage to Boston in 1761. Africans composed an increasing share of Massachusetts slave imports since the late 1730s. In the 1740s and 1750s, when importing generally lagged, slaves of identifiably African origination outnumbered West Indians nearly seven to one. But Wheatley and the other Africans who came to Massachusetts in unprecedented numbers in the early 1760s were destined to become key players in a colonial dispute over the "enslavement" of their masters, and ultimately of themselves.⁶¹

As slaving trends in previous decades tied Boston to cadences of the wider British Atlantic, the peak years of African importation in the town coincided with the pinnacle of that trade in other northern cities from Newport to New York and Philadelphia and across the Upper and Lower South in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. Parlia

Slave-For-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704–1781